Cultivation of edible ectomycorrhizal mushrooms. Trends Biotechnol

The edible mycorrhizal mushrooms include some of the world’s most expensive foods and have a global market measured in US $ billions. Despite this, few have been cultivated with any degree of success, and certainly not in volumes that are likely to reverse the catastrophic declines in production that have occurred over the past 100 years. The main obstacles to their cultivation are their need to be associated with a host plant to success-fully grow and fruit, contamination with other ectomy-corrhizal fungi both before and after the establishment of plantations, and a general lack of understanding of each mushroom’s trophic relationships, and biotic, edaphic and climatic requirements. Mycorrhizas are ancient symbiotic associations between specialised fungi and the fine roots of the majority of species of higher plants [1–4] (se